[olug] 2TB Harddrives On Sale

[Luke-Jr]

On Saturday 08 May 2010 05:57:55 pm Charles Bird wrote:
> I know its supposed to work, and does most of the time, but the thing is,
>  is that no one should be comfortable just because they are RAID, take
>  those backups whenever you can :)

You need backups even if RAID works perfectly. RAID can only protect from a 
very specific sub-category (partial hard drive failures) of a category 
(hardware failure) of data loss. It does NOT protect against disk/RAID 
controller failure, nor filesystem bugs that cause corruption, and not 
remotely the far more common problem of *user error*, accidentally deleting 
important files or such. RAID covers only a small fraction of what backups 
cover, in terms of protection from data loss. But RAID isn't *for* protecting 
against data loss, it's for *avoiding downtime* that usually results from 
hardware-related data loss. If uptime is really important enough, I'd probably 
want to duplicate the entire server in a geographically diverse location, 
making it fully redundant. So to conclude, RAID is what its acronym states: a 
Redundant Array of *Inexpensive* Disks. In other words, a poor man's 
redundancy.